You Can and Should Blame Young People When They Act Like Lazy Cheaters, Actually

fear of "old man yells at cloud" has become a culture-devouring virus

“this rocks actually” - Cool Professor

Recently a bunch of young people have been using the term “point of view” in a way that’s unhelpful. I say unhelpful rather than wrong because I have zero interest in jumping into the grammar wars, which aren't actually much of a war. Just about zero people out there are actually strict grammarians, and the collective essaying world has taken sides against “grammar Nazis” at a scale of at least 1000 to 1, so it’s a war against almost no human enemy. You see that with this whole POV business; there’s ten billion essays and tweets and YouTube videos defending the practice and like one guy on the bus who hates it, but we have to pretend that he’s the hegemonic force or whatever. It’s weird stuff, but the impulse ultimately has a clear source: fear of looking old.

The deal is that much of Gen Z (and “Gen Alpha,” which is the dumbest generational name ever devised) uses “point of view,” or “POV,” to mean simply “look at this,” rather than “this image or video is shown from the point of view of X,” the traditional usage. Apparently it’s all over TikTok in particular - a video will be labeled “POV: an elephant,” and what you see is an elephant and not something seen from the perspective of an elephant. “POV: you rollerskated for the first time” but it’s just video of the TikTok user rollerskating rather than rollerskating from the perspective of the rollerskater. You get the idea. This usage is unhelpful and impractical, if you ask me, whether or not we want to call it incorrect! As is so often the case with imprecision in language, this behavior gets rid of a very useful construction and puts in its place something we already could say in many different ways. As with turning “literally” into an empty intensifier often applied to metaphorical use, the mass meta-sanctimony of the anti-grammarian set on this issue has left the English language weaker than it was and called it progressive. And now here the NYT trots out a linguist to tell you that you’re a reactionary for maybe preferring the more useful version.

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The whole world of anti-grammar cop cops is its own thing and, like so much else of what passes for progressive these days, is vastly larger and more influential and more powerful than the target it mislabels hegemonic. (“I don’t care who knows it or what it costs me… language pedantry is irritating!” Truly, profile in courage.) The Times piece suggest that people insisting on a correct usage of language may be engaged in an effort to enforce “social power,” despite the fact that the anti-grammarians won in an absolute rout decades ago and obviously have more social power. It’s not hard to find a linguist who comes down forcefully on the side of “everything goes” in language; indeed, almost all of them do, and the NYT employs one of them as a columnist. That this attitude amounts to telling other people how to use language by saying that you can’t tell other people how to use language is a simple point that remains undiscussed. (Remember friends: every descriptivism is meta-linguistically prescriptivist.) It’s remarkable how there’s no right way to use language, but the people who want to use it the traditional way are inevitably wrong! It’s all a will to power, all of it.

The deeper context here is the fact that the people using “POV” in a way almost tailor-made to obscure meaning and reduce comprehensibility are young, and the desire to avoid being the fogey criticizing young people has become a civilization-swallowing meme, a reflexive, terrified behavior driven by the deepest fear our culture possesses: the fear of looking old. The pieces defending using POV when meaning “look at this” or “literally” when meaning “intensely” or “ironically” when meaning, fuck, who knows at this point, they sprout like mushrooms in cowshit because of the fear of aging, the fear of being owned, the fear of “old man yells at cloud.” Desperate to avoid looking like the wrong kind of old person, aging writers and journos and commentators look for excuse after excuse for bad behavior by the young. And there’s no better example than the absolutely dogged refusal to judge young students for cheating with LLMs.

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There’s a particular sound a room full of educated adults makes when a young person does something wrong; you’ve heard it many times before and so have I. It’s the sound of a roomful of tightened throats clearing in unison, preparing to explain that it isn’t really the young person’s fault. Consider this remarkable document from The New Yorker. In it, a bunch of career college educators lament the rise of AI cheating in higher education, discuss techniques they use to try to curtail that cheating (or, often, rationalize giving up on that effort), and sing sad dirges for what college used to be. The one thing that seems anathema to most of them is judging college students for engaging in straightforwardly unethical behavior. Why, we couldn’t do that! We couldn’t look at people deliberately and knowingly violating a basic agreement that they’ve made with their professors and their schools and say “Perhaps this is a bit immoral.”

The teachers interviewed in that piece are largely sympathetic, if a bit myopic and far, far too eager to please their students. I’m afraid the broader tendency on campus is less thoughtful and less enlightened. No, we don’t do a lot of judging of students anymore, certainly not on the university level, where there’s palpable anxiety over not being among the young hip understanding young down to earth accommodating young professors who keeps it real, youngly. There’s an inescapable drive to be liked by the people you ostensibly have authority over, a fog of “student centered” anxiety that clouds undergraduate institutions, the impulse that brought us Cool Professors. That linked piece led to absolute howls of anger and recrimination on social media, which is just a reminder that a hit dog will holler. The reality is that academia, like media, is an industry that a lot of people join in an effort to stave off their terror at their advancing age, to be around youth and (they hope) maybe suck some of it up by osmosis.

Honestly, I think a lot of modern college teachers just don’t want to handle the drag of disciplining students, so they come up with tortured justifications for why they shouldn’t ever have to do so. But of course disciplining students is a core part of ensuring that they get what they’re supposed to out of their educations, which means this is a matter of instructors putting their own emotional comfort over the best interests of students. Seems bad!

The spectacle of grown adults insisting that we simply cannot judge college students for outsourcing their thinking to machines is one of those little moral evasions that contemporary culture specializes in: tender, quasi-therapeutic, progressive-sounding, and ultimately a form of abandonment. Of course we can judge them! It is our duty to judge them. There is no such thing as schooling without judgment; no matter what the Cool Professors say, assessment has always been part of education, always always always, and all assessing is a form of judging. That we are judging ethically and morally when we tell students that it’s wrong to cheat does not make it any less core to the educational mission. And the idea that cheating with an LLM is somehow beyond moral evaluation because the technology is new, or because capitalism is bad, or because everybody is anxious, or because life is haaaaaard…. These feelings are not expressions of compassion but condescension dressed up as sophistication. Students are not, in fact, incredibly fragile creatures, and to the degree that they are it’s because we’ve told them to be. Students are moral agents. They make decisions. They know when they’re cheating! And when we refuse to say so, when we wrap every act of dishonesty in therapeutic fog, we’re not liberating them from shame or coercion; we’re telling them that their choices don’t matter, that their integrity isn’t worth defending, and that the university itself has no purpose beyond the smooth processing of tuition payments into credentials.

The students who feed their essay prompts into ChatGPT, copy the output into a Google Doc, turn it in to the professor, and then lie when asked about it… those students, we’re assured, are victims! Victims of the incentive structure; victims of credentialism; victims of capitalism, natch. (Isn’t it lovely how the centuries-old political theory and moral philosophy of socialism have become, in 2026, nothing else than a set of always-available excuses for doing whatever you want?) They’re victims of an education system that was always already a fraud, so who could possibly blame them for committing their own modest little fraud in return? The machine was rigged, the reasoning goes, therefore cheating isn’t cheating but a kind of folk justice, a kid getting their own against a system designed to grind them down…. One question: is this how morality works? No. No, it is not. And how someone who sincerely holds such beliefs could draw a university paycheck without dying of hypocrisy, I couldn’t tell you. If the system is that exploitative and corrupt, your obligation is to quit. Quit!

It’s true: the conditions people are born into shape the range of choices available to them, the kid from the under-resourced district and the rich private school kid are not standing at the same starting line, and incentives are real and powerful and a society which builds a maze and then punishes the rats for taking the shortcut is a society engaged in an elaborate exercise in bad faith. All of that’s true! The problem is that none of it implies that the individual student who chose to cheat did not choose to cheat. And if we care about students, if we respect and honor them, then we respect and honor their capacity for acting as moral beings. It’s absolutely bizarre to me, the way that the people who claim to serve as advocates for students end up damning them with a kind of condescending excuse-making that any one of us would be insulted by.

Somewhere in the last twenty years we collectively decided that to explain a behavior is to excuse it, that causation and culpability are the same substance, that the moment you locate a structural reason for an action you have thereby dissolved the actor inside it, like roofies in a cocktail. “I am baffled by people who say “That schizophrenic man who muttered an anti-Semitic slur deserves no sympathy because mental illness doesn’t do that” and also “That rich kid Dalton grad couldn’t help but ask Gemini to do his homework because he lives in, like, systems or whatever.”) Though this attitude is usually delivered with pretenses of great sophistication, there’s nothing sophisticated about it. A genuinely sophisticated person can hold two ideas at once: the system is unjust AND you, specifically, made a choice and the choice was wrong and you knew it was wrong, which is precisely why you lied about it afterward. The lie is the tell! Nobody lies about something they believe they were actually morally entitled to do. The student who cheats and then conceals it knows he did something wrong. The only people pretending not to know are the adults.

Yes, the students are behaving as you might expect most eighteen-year-olds to behave. Sure, groovy. But the whole point of existing as a moral being is to be the exception to the “most,” to have an individual ethical self and to make choices not as an avatar of an age range or as a subject stricken by stru-stru-structural conditions. But sure - eighteen year olds often cut corners. Eighteen year olds can be lazy and self-justifying and frightened. Sure. That’s a not-entirely-wrong description of youth. I don’t expect every last nineteen-year-old to have the moral spine to resist a tool that produces a passable essay in nine seconds while his roommate sleeps and his deadline approaches. But, again, what is moral is not about what everyone does; it’s about what the individual does. If behavior was justified by how many other people were doing it, well, there would be no such thing as a coherent morality.

The problem is the grown men and women (tenured, bylined, salaried, blue-checked) who have constructed an entire rhetorical apparatus with the sole function of ensuring that no young person is ever held responsible for anything, ever, under any circumstances. And they’ve done so not out of compassion but out of personal vanity. They’ve seen the cultural construct of the old person who complains about the youth these days, probably on Twitter, and because they have no fundamental sense of self to call their own, they fear that the construct will become their reality. So they forgive and they excuse and they rationalize and they dissemble…. This relentless exoneration of the young is less a matter of generosity and more a type of status play. It’s a way for a 36-year-old podcaster or a 45-year-old columnist or a 58-year-old dean or a 63-year-old author to purchase (at the students expense) the one thing those people want more than tenure or relevance or grandchildren: the assurance that they are not old.

The man who says “young people today have no work ethic” is a figure of mockery, a cartoon, a Fox News uncle, a Boomer in the worst sense. And, sure, that’s a lame thing to say. But no one who’s spent years cultivating a self-image as enlightened, dynamic, and savvy will allow themselves to be mistaken for that figure. So they overcorrect. They flip the polarity entirely! They become the adult who, presented with overwhelming evidence that a cohort of students is lying and cheating on an industrial scale, responds by indicting the assignments, the professors, the system, man. By indicting himself, performatively, in the safest imaginable way, the way that costs nothing and flatters everything. We failed them, man. The essay is dead, they announce, with the serene confidence of those who have found a way to be on the right side of history while doing absolutely nothing and disciplining absolutely no one. They gets to feel humble and brave and young, all at once, and the bill for this little performance is sent, as it always is, to the people with the least power in the room: the students who don’t cheat.

After all, in every class there is that inconvenient kid who didn’t cheat, the kid who turned down the chance to use the easy machine and sat with the blank page and produced something worse than what the cheater produced, because that’s what learning looks like - it looks like producing worse things slowly until you can produce better things. Sadly that kid’s watching and learning, watching his peers and his teachers, and this white-knuckled dedication to never judging cheaters is teaching them the worse possible lesson. That kid sees the cheaters get the same grades, or better ones, and witnesses the adults who rush to explain that the cheaters are the real victim here, and that kid learns the actual lesson of contemporary American education: integrity is a sucker’s bet, a tax that only the honest pay. I don’t know if there’s a name for a moral system that consistently rewards deception and punishes cooperation, but I can tell you that it leads to a collapsing society, and we’re living in one. If it makes you feel better, those most responsible certainly aren’t the teenagers.

And this connects with what I’m constantly saying about education and how our romantic notions about it ruin everything: yes, we have to force students to be ethical and to not cheat, and this should not surprise us because the basic act of schooling is forcing students to do things. Coercion is at the heart of education.

Education is a form of coercion. We can dress it up in all the gentle constructivist language we like, we can do the Freire thing, we can pretend that every student is a tiny autodidact yearning only for the right “learning environment,” but the plain truth is that most people learn most of the things they learn because someone makes them. They read the book because there’s a quiz. They solve the problems because there’s a grade. They show up because absences have consequences. This attitude isn’t some monstrous betrayal of pedagogy; it is pedagogy, at least for the great mass of students. Civilization itself is the long, uneven process of forcing our worst instincts into contact with better obligations until habit and conscience start to take over. We have truancy laws for a reason! Leave a pack of kids in a room alone with a textbook, even bright kids, come back in a few hours, and you will find them no smarter. That’s just how kids work. And yes, a big part of teaching is forcing students to be ethical. Not because we want to be wardens of their souls, but because ethics, like algebra or music theory or writing a coherent paragraph, are not magically summoned from within by vibes. Ethics are cultivated under constraint. They’re learned, like almost anything worth learning, through rules, standards, penalties, and the repeated experience of being told “no.” The fantasy that students will become honest scholars while we refuse to impose honesty on them is just another adult abdication masquerading as humane insight. It asks nothing of them, cultivates nothing in them, and then flatters itself for its tenderness while the whole enterprise rots.

Our society has now spent decades marinating in the idea that the best we can do for people is to make excuses for them and ask nothing of them; this is the heart of therapeutic culture, people insisting that they can’t be blamed for cheating on their partner because of their trauma, a nation of busy little meritocrats who lie about having ADHD or autism to get more time on the test, insisting to themselves that capitalism is rigged so they can’t be blamed. The exoneration racket dresses contempt up as compassion because to refuse to blame someone is to refuse to take them seriously as a moral agent. It is to say “I don’t expect anything of you, because I don’t believe you are capable of anything.” When you tell a young person that cheating isn’t their fault, that they’re merely a leaf on the river of capitalism, you’re telling them that they’re not a person but a puppet jerked around by forces they cannot resist and shouldn’t bother trying. That’s about as insulting as it gets. Blame, on the other hand, real blame, the kind that says “you did this, you’re better than this, and I am holding you to that,” is at heart an assumption of dignity, the refusal to give up on someone. Every parent who’s ever loved a child knows this in their bones; it’s only in public, in print, in the great laundering machine of professional opinion that we’ve forgotten it.

So, yes. I blame the students, when they cheat, when they stick the prompt in ChatGPT and then look the professor in the eye and pretend they wrote it themselves. I blame them and you should too, if you want the best for them. Blame them as a form of respect, blame them and then help them, blame them and then build something better, blame them while also burning down the credential mill and the surveillance software and the whole rotten edifice that gives people excuses to cheat. But do not, for the sake of your own self-image, for the cheap pleasure of feeling forever young and forever on the right side, pretend that nothing bad happened and no one did anything wrong. We live in a coarsened society where almost everyone appears to have given up. And when someone cheats, even a young person who you would like to exonerate for your own selfish emotional reasons, you should have the courage to say “You did something wrong, you knew it was wrong, and you deserve censure, blame, consequences.” And the only reason you won’t say that is that you’re more afraid of being seen as old than you are of being a coward - which is itself, I’m sorry to report, the most reliable sign of getting old there is.